Alarm Fatigue in Manufacturing: How to Reduce Noise and Surface What Matters

If you walk into a facility and alarms are constantly going off—buzzing, beeping, flashing—and nobody is reacting, that’s a system problem.

Most alarm issues don’t show up overnight. They build slowly. People get used to them. They work around them. And over time, something that was meant to help operators respond turns into background noise.

I’ve seen it over and over again.

The good news is: most of it comes back to a few design decisions you can fix.

More Alarms Don’t Mean Better Visibility

 There’s a tendency—especially during design or when something goes wrong—to say, “Let’s just add an alarm for it.” On the surface, that feels like better visibility—more data, more awareness. But in practice, it does the opposite. It creates noise.

Most of the alarm problems I see trace back to poor rationalization and weak design—bad setpoints, no deadbands, no delays, or alarms firing in states where they don’t even matter. Over time, it adds up. You end up with alarms for things that don’t require action.

I’ve seen normal process steps—like a product finishing in a machine—trigger alarms. That’s not an alarm. That’s information. And every time you treat information like an alarm, you make it harder to spot what actually matters.

When Everything Is an Emergency, Nothing Is an Emergency

When I go into a facility, one of the first things I do is talk to the operators. I’ll ask how many alarms they see in a shift—and more importantly, which ones they actually pay attention to. If the answer to that second question is “not many,” that tells me there’s an alarm fatigue problem—even if everything looks fine on paper.

What usually gets them there is pretty simple: too many alarms get added over time. Every issue turns into an alert. Every edge case becomes something someone didn’t want to miss. But eventually, everything starts to feel urgent. And when everything feels urgent, you end up with operator overload—frequent alarms, stale alarms, flood conditions, too many process alarms, too many machine faults. The system is making a lot of noise, but important information isn’t getting through.

The risk is real:

• • • Slower response to true emergencies
    • Missed abnormal conditions
    • Longer downtime or increased safety exposure

Most facilities don’t address this until something goes wrong—either a response comes too late, or something happens and there is no meaningful alarm in the first place.

Alarms Exist to Drive Meaningful Action

At the end of the day, a useful alarm aligns with ANSI/ISA-18.2. It drives operator action, has a real consequence if ignored, and gives enough time to respond. If it’s not doing that, it’s not helping.

Good alarm design starts with understanding:

• • • Normal operating conditions
    • What “abnormal” actually looks like
    • The consequence if nothing is done
    • And how much time the operator has to respond

Those answers determine whether something should be an alarm, how it’s prioritized, and how it behaves in the system. Get that right, and you end up with a system that actually works—one that helps operators catch issues early, respond in time, and spend less time troubleshooting after the fact. That’s the foundation behind standards like ANSI/ISA-18.2.

When alarms are tied to clear, time-bound action, the signal stands out and the noise fades into the background. Priorities become easier to interpret because they reflect real risk and real response time. An immediate safety issue shouldn’t look the same as something that can be handled during scheduled maintenance—if they do, the system isn’t guiding decisions.

I’ve seen this in cases where alarms stay active even when a machine is intentionally shut down—things like pumps not running during a shutdown condition. That’s noise, and it chips away at trust.

Get Back to What Actually Matters

If this sounds familiar to what you’re seeing at your facility, it’s probably worth taking a step back and reevaluating how your alarms are working today.

That’s where an outside perspective can make a difference. When you’ve lived with a system for a long time, it’s easy to get used to things. Sometimes it takes someone walking the floor, looking at the alarm history, and asking a simple question like: “Why is this happening all the time?”

That’s the kind of conversation Kendall Electric aims to support. Not by prescribing what your alarms should be—but by helping you think through what’s happening, sharing best-practice considerations, and answering technical questions based on real field experience with systems like Rockwell Automation—so you can cut through the noise and rebuild trust in your alarm system.

Connect with me—or one of our specialists, to talk it through. We can help review what you are seeing, discuss how Rockwell Automation tools like FactoryTalk and PlantPAx support better alarm behavior, and share best-practice considerations based on field experience. From there, your team can decide what makes sense for your process.